Establishment Media Circles the Wagons on Gun Control

Joe Klein, writing for Time Magazine, is surprised that the neocon Bill Kristol would come out against the Second Amendment.

“People have a right to handguns and hunting rifles,” Kristol told Fox News. “I don’t think they have a right to semiautomatic, quasi–machine guns that can shoot hundred of bullets at a time. And I actually think the Democrats are being foolish as they are being cowardly. I think there is more support for some moderate forms of gun control.”

Klein and other apologists for the coercive power of the state over the individual often feign misunderstanding of their supposed political opponents on the other side of the false left-right paradigm. Kristol and the neocon faction supported by the ruling elite, of course, are on the same page as Klein and supposed “moderate” or liberal Democrats, although they usually pretend to be ideologically opposed.

Democrat senator Chuck Schumer and the gun-grabbers in Congress say the Second Amendment protects hunters and people who buy handguns and rifles for self-defense. This is, however, nothing more than a cynical effort to placate and distract millions of Americans who believe they have a right to own guns, for whatever reason (many Americans are ignorant of the reason the Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights). Schumer and Kristol and the gun-grabber crowd in Washington are moving to reinstall Clinton’s assault weapons ban that expired in 2004.

The Second Amendment, of course, has nothing to do with deer hunting or home invasions. The founders knew self-defense was not only a natural right, but a duty. The Second Amendment was designed to put a stop to tyrannical government.

“The question is: Why would anyone need an assault rifle?” asks Jim Shea of the Hartford Courant. “As far as I can determine, the answer is: We the people need assault rifles in case the government tries to take away our assault rifles.”

Shea skirts the issue ignored by the defenders of the state’s monopoly of violence like Bill Kristol and Chuck Schumer. He falls short of actually understanding why the Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights, although his op-ed hints that he may actually have a clue.

Council on Foreign Relations member and Guggenheim fellow Joe Klein is a bit more circumspect and strives to come off as a “moderate” on gun control. After admitting that gun violence is at a historically low level, he writes that “mass shootings have exploded in frequency since the 1970s” while ignoring the fact that multiple victim homicides are so small as to be almost insignificant. 0.1% of mass shootings involved five or more victims, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Moreover, Klein’s characterization that mass shootings have exploded is a gross exaggeration – the proportion of homicide incidents involving two victims increased slightly from 2.7% in 1980 to 3.7% in 2008. Homicide incidents involving three or more victims increased during this same period, but remained less than 1% of all homicides each year. This hardly qualifies as an explosion.

The inability of government “to have this conversation now,” Klein writes, “says a lot about the paralytic dysfunction of our political system” and its inability to radically clip the Second Amendment. Outlawing semi-automatic weapons “should be a no-brainer,” the world government club member argues.

The game plan of the global elite, represented in the corporate media by Joe Klein, should be a no-brainer as well. It may be so-called “assault weapons” today – that Kristol idiotically states “can shoot hundred of bullets at a time” – but it will be all weapons tomorrow. The anti-gun treaty now before the United Nations includes provisions for the registration and licensing, micro-stamping ammunition, and restrictions on the private transfers of guns.

The highly suspicious mass shooting in Colorado arrived at exactly the right time for the globalists and their corporate media scriveners. Outlawing semi-automatic weapons with brand spanking new assault weapons legislation will now take center stage and will be used as a stepping stone for more draconian legislation down the road.